The total number of stars in the Universe "is likely three times bigger than realized." Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum says there are "possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars," dramatically increasing the possibility of finding alien civilizations.OK, so we've found a huge new amount of mass in the universe, yeah? So... How much does this reduce the need for Dark Matter? What does this tell us about such things? Is it miniscule compared to the amount of Dark Matter we hypothesize or does it take a big chunk out of the missing matter or even completely eliminate it???
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geomicrobiologist and NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow based at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and her colleagues report online today in Science that a member of the Halomonadaceae family of proteobacteria can use arsenic in place of phosphorus.posted by statolith at 9:55 AM on December 2, 2010 [1 favorite]
Astrobiologists found the arsenic-based bacteria while looking for a possible "second genesis" of life on Earth. […] Last year study leader Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA's Astrobiology Institute published a paper suggesting that one possible version of Life 2.0 would be a creature that chemically substitutes arsenic for phosphorus.posted by hattifattener at 7:37 PM on December 2, 2010
[…]
Despite their oddity, however, [the GFAJ-1 strain found in Mono Lake] are genetically too similar to ordinary life to truly be descendents of a second genesis. "This is not Life 2.0," Davies said.
Bottom line: Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. The mass spec measurements may be very well done (I lack expertise here), but their value is severely compromised by the poor quality of the inputs. If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I'd send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls...posted by grouse at 8:14 AM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]
I don't know whether the authors are just bad scientists or whether they're unscrupulously pushing NASA's 'There's life in outer space!' agenda. I hesitate to blame the reviewers, as their objections are likely to have been overruled by Science's editors in their eagerness to score such a high-impact publication.
There's been a lot of hype around the news of GFAJ-1, the microbe claimed to substitute arsenate for phosphate in its DNA. In the midst of all the excitement, one thing has been overlooked:posted by grouse at 2:09 PM on December 5, 2010 [2 favorites]
The claim is almost certainly wrong.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology research fellow at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and the study's lead author, refused to address criticisms. "We are not going to engage in this sort of discussion," she wrote in an e-mail to Nature. "Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that all discussion is properly moderated."posted by grouse at 10:10 AM on December 7, 2010 [1 favorite]
But Jonathan Eisen, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, calls this "ludicrous", after a NASA press release drew media attention with claims of an "astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life", a theme that Wolfe-Simon echoed at the briefing. "It is absurd for them to say that they are only going have the discussion in the scientific literature, when they started it," he says.
The authors of the paper declined my invitations to address their scientific critics in my Slate article, saying that such an exchange should only take place in a peer-reviewed journal. This afternoon, one of them, Ron Ormeland, gave a lecture at the Carnegie Institution, streamed live on NASA’s web site, in which he explicitly referred to exactly the criticisms raised by the people I wrote about. And then, after his talk, he fielded questions from Carnegie scientists, who asked exactly the same kinds of questions raised by the scientists in my article.posted by grouse at 2:50 PM on December 7, 2010
Discuss.
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ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE
posted by Ratio at 9:14 PM on December 1, 2010 [31 favorites]